How many times had she stood at the railing of a departing or arriving ship in her life, hopeful or fretful? How often had she fallen in love on shipboard, and lost love on shore?

What had she thought when seeing New York and its hubris of high-rise buildings for the first time? The last? She'd resolved to live out her life here, and only her hated mother came to help her bid adieu to it. Not one man came who had toasted her, feted her, admired her, loved her, lost her . . . in life.

What had she really felt, when all was said and done?

I would never really know. Nor would Irene. But we would always wonder, and in that way alone Lola lived on.

CODA:.

Sex, Lies, and Obfuscation.

We believe that many overtures have been made to draw the celebrated Countess of Landsfeld from her retirement in GrassValley, and exhibit her once more upon the stage in this city, but thus far, they seem to have failed . . . . We may therefore give up all hopes of seeing the celebrated 'spider dance' for some time.

-PATRICK HULL, EX-HUSBAND, IN DAILY TOWN TALK, 1855.

Pity the scrupulous academic who tries to untangle the history of Eliza Rosana Maria Dolores Gilbert James Heald Hull, better known for half of her life as Lola Montez.

Copious printed materials from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries about this larger-than-life figure abound. In addition there's the testimony of her own autobiography, lectures, play, and book on beauty. Still, the truth about Lola remains as elusive as the phantom arachnids she pursued through her petticoats over thirteen years and three continents in her infamous "spider dance."

She is supposed to have inspired the old saw that became the title of a Broadway musical song a hundred years after her death: "Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets."

Her play, Lola Montez in Bavaria, was very likely the first "docudrama" and the first play in which the principal actor was also the subject. Years later, Buffalo Bill Cody would start his performing career by enacting his own very different adventures in the same way.

As for information about Lola found with the Huxleigh diaries, along with fragments from other sources of the time, including Nellie Bly and, most interestingly Sherlock Holmes, the truth of many of these facts, including her late-life religious conversion, has been recorded by history.

(Lola Montez did indeed visit the Magdalen Asylum, a refuge for "fallen women" that was more enlightened than many. Bishop Henry Codman Potter was a social and political reformer dedicated to improving the lot of the poor. On the Lower East Side he instituted missions, workingmen's clubs, day nurseries, kindergartens, and even sought to "uplift" the saloon environment.) The only new documentation are the musings from the "Dangerous Woman" herself. These present a provocative revision of Lola's interaction with Cornelius Vanderbilt. Whether fortunes in gold had been transported from California to the Vanderbilt burial vault or kept there, no source can verify this. What has been historically documented is that Pinkerton guards kept twenty-four-hour watch on the Vanderbilt mausoleum for fifty years. In light of the events related in this book, one has to wonder why, if not for some secret and literally subterranean reason.

Just four years after the time of these events, the U. S. government faced economic collapse. It was only saved by the enormous gold reserves of certain prominent financiers, such as J. P. Morgan. And the Vanderbilts? Perhaps.

Within five years, Alva would divorce William Kissam Vanderbilt, charging adultery. Shortly after marrying Consuelo to the English duke mama selected for her, Alva remarried. Her second husband was Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, son of August Belmont and a divorced man himself. Rumors even before the events shown in this book linked Alva and the younger Belmont. Willie Vanderbilt had been in the papers even earlier for maintaining a mistress abroad. The mayor of New York had to unite Alva and Oliver, as no clergyman then would marry a pair of divorced persons.

Not even scandal could sink the S. S. Alva, although the enormous yacht her first husband had named in her honor did indeed sink after being hit by a passing freighter shortly before their marriage finally foundered. After her divorce, Alva reported that "society was by turns stunned, horrified, and then savage." The friends who cut her dead came around in the end. "I always do everything first," Alva said. "I was the first girl of my 'set' to marry a Vanderbilt. I was the first society woman to ask for a divorce . . . . Within a year ever so many others had followed my example. They had not dared to do it until I showed them the way."

She also showed them the way to snaring blue bloods abroad. She was implacably determined to marry her daughter Consuelo to Charles Spencer-Churchill, the young duke of Marlborough, to further her own social ambitions. In that way she matched Eliza Gilbert's mother and her actions of roughly sixty years before. Consuelo Vanderbilt's eighteen-year-old heart belonged to a New York society man, but Alva kept her daughter prisoner at home, denied mail as well as visitors. Alva even shammed a heart attack and blamed Consuelo, also threatening to shoot the American suitor dead if Consuelo attempted to contact him.

The arranged marriage was bitterly unhappy from the first; the duke also had given up a "true love" for the injection of American money that would save his immense Blenheim Palace. After two children and ten years the couple separated.

Alva Vanderbilt Belmont later became a leader of the women's suffrage movement. When Consuelo sought an annulment of her loveless marriage to Marlborough twenty-five years later to make a love match with a Catholic man, Alva testified that she'd used threats of suicide and murder to force Consuelo into her first marriage and won her daughter's annulment. Consuelo remarried happily.

History has always dismissed Lola's anger against the Jesuits and her frequent public charges that their vengeance pursued her the rest of her life. When she was a prime influence on King Ludwig in Bavaria, though, she did persuade him to make liberal reforms. Her advice encouraged him to dismiss the Jesuit clerics among his cabinet and advisors, to grant freedom of the press, and to support a more secular form of government that was, in fact, the wave of the future in Europe.

So the foes seen here still pursuing Lola after her death bear out that enmity, and reflect the Bavarian populace's anger at the huge sums of money King Ludwig lavished on his Lolitta's residence, furnishings, and wardrobe. Compared to what his grandson spent obsessively building immense and lavish castles, Ludwig's generosity to Lola was a pittance. Latterday Bavarians longed for the days of Ludwig I, so it's not impossible to think that a by-blow heir less likely to be tainted by madness might appeal to some . . . especially as a shadow ruler for the ousted Ultramontanes.

Both the king and Lola denied that she was ever his mistress. Despite the romantic and sexual nature of their letters, Lola's most recent and thorough biographer, Bruce Seymour, could find evidence that the king and Lola were physically intimate only twice. The king was sixty when they met, and Lola was passing herself off as in her early rather than late twenties. Both seemed to enjoy drama more than anything.

Those who wish to study the facts for themselves can find numerous biographies and reference books about Lola Montez, and even more contradictions.

Fiona Witherspoon, Ph.D., FIA*

November 5, 2003.

*Friends of Irene Adler.

Perhaps it has taken until the end of this century for an author

like Douglas to be able to imagine a female protagonist who

could be called 'the' woman by Sherlock Holmes.

-GROUNDS FOR MURDER, 1991.

To encourage the reading and discussion of Carole Nelson Douglas's acclaimed novels examining the Victorian world from the viewpoint of one of the most mysterious woman in literature, the following descriptions and discussion topics are offered. The author interview, biography, and bibliography will aid discussion as well.

Set in 18801890 London, Paris, Prague, Monaco, and most recently New York City, the Irene Adler novels reinvent the only woman to have outwitted Sherlock Holmes as the complex and compelling protagonist of her own stories. Douglas's portrayal of "this remarkable heroine and her keen perspective on the male society in which she must make her independent way," noted The New York Times, recasts her "not as a loose-living adventuress but a woman ahead of her time." In Douglas's hands, the fascinating but sketchy American prima donna from "A Scandal in Bohemia" becomes an aspiring opera singer moonlighting as a private inquiry agent. When events force her from the stage into the art of detection, Adler's exploits rival those of Sherlock Holmes himself as she crosses paths and swords with the day's leading creative and political figures while sleuthing among the Bad and the Beautiful of Belle Epoque Europe.

Critics praise the novels' rich period detail, numerous historical characters, original perspective, wit, and "welcome window on things Victorian."

"The private and public escapades of Irene Adler Norton [are] as erratic and unexpected and brilliant as the character herself," noted Michael Collings in Mystery Scene of Another Scandal in Bohemia (formerly Irene's Last Waltz), "a long and complex jeu d"esprit, simultaneously modeling itself on and critiquing Doylesque novels of ratiocination coupled with emotional distancing. Here is Sherlock Holmes in skirts, but as a detective with an artistic temperament and the passion to match, with the intellect to penetrate to the heart of a crime and the heart to show compassion for the intellect behind it."

ABOUT THIS BOOK.

Spider Dance, the eighth Irene Adler novel, opens in New York City in the late summer of 1889. Irene Adler Norton and her biographer-companion, spinster Nell Huxleigh, are still searching for the mysterious "Woman in Black" who may have been Irene's mother. They continue on their own, missing the third leg of their domestic life in Neuilly, near Paris: Irene's barrister husband, Godfrey Norton, who is on business in Bavaria for the Rothschild banking family, which often employs one or more of the threesome as its agents.

This leaves Irene and Nell with a trio of acquaintances in New York City, possible allies, or rivals, in their personal quest. When murder most violent enters the picture, so do Irene and Nell's uneasy associates in investigation-Sherlock Holmes and the enterprising American "stunt girl" newspaper reporter, Nellie Bly. Quentin Stanhope, an old acquaintance, British agent, and likely romantic interest for Nell, is also in New York. He should be Nell's and Irene's staunch ally, but he's been commissioned to keep Nellie Bly quiet about their shocking pursuit of Jack the Ripper (after the Whitechapel "horrors") in Paris the previous spring. This means paying far more court to the vivacious young daredevil reporter than to reserved Nell.

FOR DISCUSSION.

Related to Spider Dance:.

1. It's often been noted that protagonists in genre fiction, like mystery, traditionally don't have parents, or very visible parents, or children. This novel continues the search for a mother Irene Adler may not want to know, much less the father she never knew either. Why is she so adamant about being indifferent to her forebears? Why do you think parents and children might encumber such characters? Certainly Holmes and Watson were parentless as far as readers were concerned. Are there other favorite detectives you can think of who are singularly alone in the world? What kind of parents would you imagine Miss Marple to have had? Nero Wolfe? The only facts Doyle gave about Irene were that she had been born in New Jersey, was therefore American, and had sung grand opera. What history would you invent for her, instead of this one? Why did the author choose to give Adler the background and milieu she is developing in the American-set novels, Femme Fatale and Spider Dance?

2. Three women with varying personalities and goals are involved in tracing Irene's history. Sometimes they cooperate and sometimes they compete, as is also the case with all three in relation to Sherlock Holmes. What characteristics do you admire in each of the three women? What don't you like? Motherhood, real and mentoring, is an element of this novel's plot and theme. Who were the "good" and "bad" mothers in the book? How did the cultural imperatives of the time distort the mother-daughter relationship? The character most capable of evolving during the novels is Nell Huxleigh. Is she changing during this novel and the others in the series, and does your opinion of her change as well? What is your opinion of Nellie Bly and Nell's fear of her? The Drood Review of Mystery observed of Chapel Noir. "Douglas wants . . . women fully informed about and capable of action on the mean streets of their world." How does Spider Dance contribute to this goal?

3. New York City has always been a major setting for American fiction. Did anything about the depiction of it in this book surprise you? How many elements did you glimpse in their infancy then, which have become staples of contemporary American life? For instance, Joseph Pulitzer was just entering the newspaper business then, but the journalism awards given in his name today are the most prestigious in the country. How much can history teach us? Can history change our opinions of our own times?

Do you like to read historical novels for the facts of the time period or the attitudes, and how much do you think you can trust such evocations in fiction? Often, historical novelists say, they're challenged on the accuracy of facts that are absolutely true, but seem too modern. Are you encouraged to do more reading about the historical periods you encounter in novels?

4. Mesmerism, or hypnotism, is a minor factor in these novels: it's even hinted that Irene Adler received her last name from a little-known reference in a novel about a famous fictional mesmerist, Svengali. Trilby, the eponymous heroine of the George du Maurier (father of Daphne) novel that features Svengali, was hypnotized by him to sing beautifully although she was tone deaf. Svengali married her and forced her to tour as a singer. The Phantom of the Opera by Frenchman Gaston Leroux arrived in 1911, more than a decade after du Maurier's Trilby, and was far less popular than it is at the present time. It too featured a "monster" training a helpless young woman to sing.

Why, besides the ever-popular Beauty and the Beast parallels, did this theme of women forced to sing by taskmasters create two immortal characters, both of them men and villains? Another minor historical figure named Adler is mentioned in this book. Can you think of any other historical Adlers who might be suitable candidates for Irene's Father? You could make a game of assigning historical "parents" to fictional characters. The intersection of history and fiction can produce fascinating hybrids.

5. Sherlock Holmes has been resurrected as a character by countless writers since Doyle's death in 1930, but by very few women. Writers claim he is a very hard character to change, that even Doyle did better with stories in which Holmes was not too dominant. How is Holmes's character evolving in this series? Which aspects of Holmes as you first encountered him in fiction or film do you feel are immutable, and which allow for change? Does his associating with these particular characters, the three women, two of them liberated American women, throw a different light on his character?

Three Englishmen are continuing characters the novels: Irene's husband, Godfrey Norton, Holmes, and Quentin Stanhope. How do these men differ from each other? How do they each relate to the three women, and how is that different with each man?

6. Douglas has said she likes to work on the "large canvas" of series fiction. What kind of character development does that approach permit? Do you like it? Has television recommitted viewers/readers to the kind of multivolume storytelling common in the nineteenth century, or is the attention span of the twenty-first century too short? Is longterm, committed reading becoming a lost art?

For discussion of the Irene Adler series: 1. Douglas mentions other authors, many of them women, who have reinvented major female characters or minor characters from classic literary or genre novels to reevaluate culture then and now. Can you think of such works in the field of fantasy or historical novels? General literature? What about the recent copyright contest over The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall's reimagining of Gone with the Wind events and characters from the African-American slaves' viewpoints? Could the novel's important social points have been made as effectively without referencing the classic work generally familiar to most people? What other works have attained the mythic status that might make possible such socially conscious reinventions? What works would you revisit or rewrite?

2. Religion and morality are underlying issues in the novels, including the time's anti-Semitism. This is an element absent from the Holmes stories. How is this issue brought out and how do Nell's strictly conventional views affect those around her? Why does she take on a moral watchdog role yet remain both disapproving and fascinated by Irene's pragmatic philosophy? Why is Irene (and also most readers) so fond of her despite her opinionated personality?

3. Douglas chose to blend humor with adventurous plots. Do comic characters and situations satirize the times or soften them? Is humor a more effective form of social criticism than rhetoric? What classic writers and novelists use this technique, besides George Bernard Shaw and Mark Twain?

4. The novels also present a continuing tension between New World and Old World, America and England and.the Continent, artist-tradesman and aristocrat, as well as woman and man. Which characters reflect which camps? How does the tension show itself?

5. Chapel Noir makes several references to Dracula through the presence of Bram Stoker some six years before the novel actually was published. Stoker is also an ongoing character in other Adler novels. Various literary figures appear in the Adler novels, including Oscar Wilde, and most of these historical characters knew each other. Why was this period so rich in writers who founded much modern genre fiction, like Doyle and Stoker? The late nineteenth century produced not only Dracula, Doyle's Holmes stories, and the surviving dinosaurs of The Lost World, but also Trilby, The Phantom of the Opera, The Prisoner of Zenda, Dr. Jekylland Mr. Hyde, among the earliest and most lasting works of science fiction, political intrigue, mystery, and horror. How does Douglas pay homage to this tradition in the plots, characters, and details of the Adler novels?

AN INTERVIEW WITH.

CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS.

Q: You were the first woman to write about the Sherlock Holmes world from the viewpoint of one of Arthur Conan Doyle's women characters, and only the second woman to write a Holmes-related novel at all. Why?

A: Most of my fiction ideas stem from my role as social observer in my first career, journalism. One day I looked at the mystery field and realized that all post-Doyle Sherlockian novels were written by men. I had loved the stories as a child and thought it was high time for a woman to examine the subject from a female point of view.

Q: So there was "the" woman, Irene Adler, the only woman to outwit Holmes, waiting for you.

A: She seems the most obvious candidate, but I bypassed her for that very reason to look at other women in what is called the Holmes Canon. Eventually I came back to "A Scandal in Bohemia." Rereading it, I realized that male writers had all taken Irene Adler at face value as the king of Bohemia's jilted mistress, but the story doesn't support that. As the only woman in the Canon who stirred a hint of romantic interest in the aloof Holmes, Irene Adler had to be more than this beautiful but amoral "Victorian vamp." Once I saw that I could validly interpret her as a gifted and serious performing artist, I had my protagonist.

Q: It was that simple?

A: It was that complex. I felt that any deeper psychological exploration of this character still had to adhere to Doyle's story, both literally and in regard to the author's own feeling toward the character. That's how I ended up having to explain that operatic impossibility, a contralto prima donna. I tend to describe Irene as a "dark" soprano to avoid assigning her either the erroneous contralto voice or the not-quite-right mezzo-soprano voice. It's been great fun justifying Doyle's error by finding operatic roles Irene could conceivably sing.

Even more satisfying has been reinventing an Irene Adler who is as intelligent, self-sufficient, and serious about her professional and personal integrity as Sherlock Holmes, and far too independent to be anyone's mistress but her own. She also moonlights as an inquiry agent while building her performing career. In many ways they are flip sides of the same coin: her profession, music, is his hobby. His profession, detection, is her secondary career. Her adventures intertwine with Holmes's, but she is definitely her own woman in these novels.

Q: How did Doyle feel toward the character of Irene Adler?

A: I believe that Holmes and Watson expressed two sides of Dr. Doyle: Watson, the medical and scientific man, also the staunch upholder of British convention; Holmes, the creative and bohemian writer, fascinated by the criminal and the bizarre. Doyle wrote classic stories of horror and science fiction as well as hefty historical novels set in the age of chivalry. His mixed feelings of attraction to and fear of a liberated, artistic woman like Irene Adler led him to "kill" her as soon as he created her. Watson states she is dead at the beginning of the story that introduces her. Irene was literally too hot for Doyle as well as Holmes to handle. She also debuted (and exited) in the first Holmes-Watson story Doyle ever wrote. Perhaps Doyle wanted to establish an unattainable woman to excuse Holmes remaining a bachelor and aloof from matters of the heart. What he did was to create a fascinatingly unrealized character for generations of readers.

Q: Do your protagonists represent a split personality as well?

A: Yes, one even more sociologically interesting than the Holmes-Watson split because it embodies the evolving roles of women in the late nineteenth century. As a larger-than-life heroine, Irene is "up to anything." Her biographer, Penelope "Nell" Huxleigh, however, is the very model of traditional Victorian womanhood. Together they provide a seriocomic point-counterpoint on women's restricted roles then and now. Narrator Nell is the character who "grows" most during the series as the unconventional Irene forces her to see herself and her times in a broader perspective. This is something women writers have been doing in the past two decades: revisiting classic literary terrains and bringing the sketchy women characters into full-bodied prominence.

Q: What of "the husband," Godfrey Norton?

A: In my novels, Irene's husband, Godfrey Norton, is more than the "tall, dark, and dashing barrister" Doyle gave her. I made him the son of a woman wronged by England's then female-punitive divorce law, so he is a "supporting" character in every sense of the word. These novels are that rare bird in literature: female "buddy" books. Godfrey fulfills the useful, decorative, and faithful role so often played by women and wives in fiction and real life. Sherlockians anxious to unite Adler and Holmes have tried to oust Godfrey. William S. Baring-Gould even depicted him as a wife-beater in order to promote a later assignation with Holmes that produced Nero Wolfe! That is such an unbelievable violation of a strong female character's psychology. That scenario would make Irene Adler a two-time loser in her choice of men and a masochist to boot. My protagonist is a world away from that notion and a wonderful vehicle for subtle but sharp feminist comment.

Q: Did you give her any attributes not found in the Doyle story?

A: I gave her one of Holmes's bad habits. She smokes "little cigars." Smoking was an act of rebellion for women then. And because Doyle shows her sometimes donning male dress to go unhampered into public places, I gave her "a wicked little revolver" to carry. When Doyle put her in male disguise at the end of his story, I doubt he was thinking of the modern psychosexual ramifications of cross-dressing.

Q: Essentially, you have changed Irene Adler from an ornamental woman to a working woman.

A: My Irene is more a rival than a romantic interest for Holmes, yes. She is not a logical detective in the same mold as he, but is as gifted in her intuitive way. Nor is her opera singing a convenient profession for a beauty of the day but a passionate vocation that was taken from her by the king of Bohemia's autocratic attitude toward women, forcing her to occupy herself with detection. Although Doyle's Irene is beautiful, well dressed, and clever, my Irene demands that she be taken seriously despite these feminine attributes. Now we call it "Grrrrl power."

I like to write "against" conventions that are no longer true, or were never true. This is the thread that runs through all my fiction: my dissatisfaction with the portrayal of women in literary and popular fiction then and even now. This begins with Amberleigh-my postfeminist mainstream version of the Gothic-revival popular novels of the 1960s and 1970sand continues with Irene Adler today. I'm interested in women as survivors. Men also interest me of necessity, men strong enough to escape cultural blinders to become equal partners to strong women.

Q: How do you research these books?

A: From a lifetime of reading English literature and a theatrical background that educated me on the clothing, culture, customs, and speech of various historical periods. I was reading Oscar Wilde plays when I was eight years old. My mother's book club meant that I cut my teeth on Austen, Eliot, Balzac, Kipling, Poe, poetry, Greek mythology, Hawthorne, the Brontes, Dumas, and Dickens.

In doing research, I have a fortunate facility of using every nugget I find, or of finding that every little fascinating nugget works itself into the story. Perhaps that's because good journalists must be ingenious in using every fact available to make a story as complete and accurate as possible under deadline conditions. Often the smallest mustard seed of research swells into an entire tree of plot. The corpse on the dining-room table of Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, was too macabre to resist and spurred the entire plot of the second Adler novel, The Adventuress (formerly Good Morning, Irene). Stoker rescued a drowning man from the Thames and carried him home for revival efforts, but it was too late.

Besides using my own extensive library on this period, I've borrowed from my local library all sorts of arcane books they don't even know they have because no one ever checks them out. The Internet aids greatly with the specific fact. I've also visited London and Paris to research the books, a great hardship, but worth it. I also must visit Las Vegas periodically for my contemporarily-set Midnight Louie mystery series. No sacrifice is too great.

Q: Why have the reissued paperback editions of three of the first four Adlers been given new titles?

A: After Good Night, Mr. Holmes and its sequel, Good Morning, Irene were published in the early 1990s, another mystery novel titled Good Night, Irene came out. The very similar title formats caused great confusion in the publishing industry over several books. When I resumed the Adler series after a seven-year hiatus and the first paperbacks were almost out of print, it was an opportunity to end the confusion for good, as well as update the covers. Good Night, Mr. Holmes, the first Adler novel, retains its title and was reissued in January of 2005. Good Morning, Irene is now in print as The Adventuress, and Irene's Last Waltz is now in print as Another Scandal in Bohemia. The reissued, retitled editions also have the original title on the cover, for readers' information, and the new titles all relate to Conan Doyle's foundation story, "A Scandal in Bohemia." I made some small revisions in the reissues, including correcting a time-line glitch resulting from the seven-year hiatus.

Q: You've written fantasy and science-fiction novels, why did you turn to mystery?

A: All novels are fantasy and all novels are mystery in the largest sense. Although mystery was often an element in my early novels, when I evolved the Irene Adler idea, I considered it simply a novel. Good Night, Mr. Holmes was almost on the shelves before I realized it would be "categorized" as a mystery. So Irene is utterly a product of my mind and times, not of the marketplace, though I always believed that the concept was timely and necessary.